Llantern

[tangara]

I was very glad to go for a walk on your Age, as I would promised to myself, and I find that it is one of the most beautiful Age I have seen, even if there is still work to do as others told you.
I love most of the textures and the sea is really stunning : colors, undertow, fabulous sunset...I am really impressed !
It is obvious that I would have liked to walk on the pipe untill its end ...and then dive and swim in these so beautiful waters ... I tried in flymode but of course I died !!!
As you says in your book : Llantern is a very nice christmas gift ! Thanks so much to you.

[N. Sigismund]

I was actually debating how to do the water for several weeks. Ideally, I would like it to be possible to go for a swim. The problem is, Llantern is constructed in a way that any real distance from shore breaks the illusion of the age.

Maybe there will be a time in the future where I'll add it, but as it stands I feel that the invisible wall is unfortunately the best way forward.

Thanks for the kind comments.

[diafero]

Actually, that's not true.

Yes it is. I check the forums anyway, so seeing new posts about new ages happens "as a side-effect". Checking your page is an extra step I of course do regularly, but far less often that I check the GoW. YMMV (for tangara: "You mileage may vary" ).
Now, if you could provide an RSS feed and/or an email notification service, checking UAM would be much easier and could be better integrated into an overall workflow. But even then, I think it is a good idea to have a thread here doing a proper announcement, also offering a natural place for people to give feedback.

Btw, I put the age on DI, and it's looking awesome . Is there any chance you could create a cover for it, so it sticks out in Relto? Also, in case you did not know - if you want a description of one or two sentences to be displayed in the book, just tell me (check Ahra Pahts to see how this looks like).

[tangara]

YMMV (for tangara: "You mileage may vary" ).

I had it (and fortunately, with explanations, because I would have never understood it ): YMMV Your Mileage May Vary (or your experience could be different)

[Justintime9]

Hey, Awesome work Sigismund! Llantern has the potential for an incredibly awesome age (not that it's not already awesome )

I had one problem when it came to the sky and water. Instead of having the awesome looking sky I've seen in screenshots, the water and sky looks like this:

I also had quite a surprise when I noticed that the "wet rock" texture in the cave was the one I uploaded to Texturu.org! glad it could be put to good use!

[tangara]

@ N. Sigismund, have you done any modifications with piedestal and linking book ? Because it does not work on the shards (UAM and DI) but it still works offline.

@ Justintime9 : isn't it your graphic card ? I tried screenshots and it works quite fine ! This just to tease you ...

Show Spoiler

Llantern.png (903.25 KiB) Viewed 6797 times

Llantern 2.png (855.36 KiB) Viewed 6797 times

Llantern 3.png (873.94 KiB) Viewed 6797 times

[Egon]

@ Egon : isn't it your graphic card ? I tried screenshots and it works quite fine ! This just to tease you ...

I have strange feling that You have ment to say "Justintime9"

Anyway:
Since we started to point out flaws, there is one thing that really bothers me. It is present in other ages, even in Cyan's, but still is very anoying. Especially that URU is a game about exploring, so such thing should not be present at all since they break imersion very much.
What I'm talking about?
Invisible walls.

I was actually debating how to do the water for several weeks. Ideally, I would like it to be possible to go for a swim. The problem is, Llantern is constructed in a way that any real distance from shore breaks the illusion of the age.

Indeed. First of all I would suggest to add currents (yes it is for Blender. I don't know if there are some tutorials on how to do it in Max). The idea is that players should be able to swim in water, but thanks to the currents, not to far away.
Next I would change mesh of borders of beach, so they go a little bit more to the sea. Combined with currents player could swim a little bit of the shore, without breaking the illusion. Bech is alredy so wide, that extenging bordering rocky coast to the sea, shouln't make this beach fell claustrophobic.

[tangara]

I have strange feling that You have ment to say "Justintime9"

Oops ! Sorry ! I edit !

[diafero]

The linking book does not work online because it is done the wrong way (and, unfortunately, many 3ds Max created ages do it that way): It uses a linking responder for linking so that no Python is required. Now, that itself is not an issue, but the issue is that it's hard to get all the linking options right. For all the ages that do linking via Python, I do have some scripts that fixes them before they get on the Shard. An age doing linking the wrong way might end up breaking the player's vault by adding spawn points that should not be there, using the wrong titles, etc. That's why fan-ages should NOT link to Cyan ags unless the creator knows what he does, including all side-effects of linking on Shards. I literally spent months to get this right and the xLinkMgr contained in the Offline KI will do the link correctly, or not at all. The actual linking data can be found in AvailableLinks.inf, in case you are interested. All fan-age linking done on DI Shard is redirected through that manager.
However, that is not possible for linking responders. Some still work, but with unintended side-effects like ages being registered for players (e.g. Hui Nexus to Huiiiii). Some do not work at all, like the link from Llantern to the city. In this case, the spawn point is incorrect (there is no "LinkInPointDefault" in the city). Actually, I am quite happy it does not work, because if it worked and added incorrect spawn points (I remember the link from Tsoidahl Shegahteeh to the city doing that), people might end up being unable to register a Nexus spawn point, or weird Nexus items, or similar.
I really need to extend my scripts to at least check for linking responders, but unfortunately nobody seems to want to implement that for libHSPlasma, so I have to do that myself

[N. Sigismund]

Thanks for all this info, guys. I always expected this first "proper release" to be buggy, but knowing what the problems are makes making it less buggy easier, obviously.

I actually tried using UAMVars to get the linking book to work properly, because I read about them when they were new and though "If they work for EVERYTHING, then they're the best option!". Unfortunately, what happened was that whenever I clicked on the book, it would not do anything, and on top of that it broke the UAMvar'd journal. There's either a lack of documentation on the UAMvar stuff, or I'm just thick and/or too hasty.

This does underline what I meant when I said that I wanted Llantern to be open source. You guys should have the right to poke around in my work and change/fix things. But that didn't happen this time because I rushed to get this release out.

I had quite bad insomnia last night, and I was thinking about ways to do a simple puzzle, namely to switch the large metal machine on the beach on. The pipe to sea isn't finished (it's supposed to become half buried in the sand and then tilt downwards into the sea and out of sight) and neither is the machine's control panel. The way I was thinking of doing it would hopefully not require much Python, namely that a certain combination of valves would switch it on, and turning valves would change variables. I don't know how complicated that would be, or if the valves will need to be turned on in a certain order or just all in the right positions.

EDIT: On the currents - could somebody give me the name of an age which uses currents? I can implement them if I know what Plasma calls them, because then I can make guesses at what they're called in Max.